Split Estate - by Charlotte Bacon (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Arthur King has lived in New York for all his adult life when his wife commits suicide one afternoon while he's away. Left alone with two teenage children, overwhelmed by the prospect of city life without his wife, Arthur decides to move the family to the small Wyoming town where he grew up. They are welcomed there by his mother, a tough, observant Western woman still clinging to the family ranch (while protesting local drilling companies on the side). In elegant, penetrating prose, Charlotte Bacon follows the surviving Kings through the course of a summer as they come to terms with the emptiness-and the openness-of their new landscape, and confront the grief that glares out at them everywhere. Split Estate is a heartrending portrait of a family uprooted and struggling to reconnect in a world irrevocably changed by loss.

Review Quotes

"Beautifully observed, achingly credible . . . [a] sad, powerful book." --The Seattle Times

"[Bacon] is the kind of writer, and this is the kind of novel, absolutely deserving of a great deal more attention from critics and readers who appreciate excellent fiction." --Katharine Weber, author of Triangle

"[Bacon's] descriptions of bottled grief and wide-open skies resonate." --Entertainment Weekly

"A sensitive exploration of place as it relates to a family coming to terms with death and change." --The Denver Post

"Densely particular and poetic." --The New Yorker

"Subtly explores the inevitability of change and the complexity of family relationships." --Booklist

"Charlotte Bacon has an acute understanding of how grief can yield, in the tiniest increments, to healing and renewal." --Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After

About the Author

Charlotte Bacon is the award-winning author of Split Estate, There is Room for You, and Lost Geography. She lives in Bali with her husband and two children.